Special Report: In SOA reality check, our writers explan how companies such as Pfizer and Sprint are trailblazing their way into a service-oriented world. This package includes the stories Building SOA your way and Web services registry aids both IT and business interests. Quoteworthy: “Don’t try to use the TLA SOA as many times as you can in a single day hoping for the best. Nothing magical will happen, your architecture will still be horrible until you do the fundamentals, meaning understanding your own needs, accessing the solution currently in place, and defining the delta. Nothing service-oriented about that, it’s a ton of work. You just need to do it.” — Dave Linthicum, in Real World SOA. Product Preview: Adobe brings on the BPM. Test Center executive editor Doug Dineley looks at how Adobe’s LiveCycle 7.0 ties document-centric processes to back-end systems, and offers up a recipe for one powerful cocktail: LiveCycle, PDF and Adobe XML. Best of the blogs: Vint Cerf answers 3 questions put forth by Greg Nawrocki in Grid Meter about the relationship between Grid and MPLS, IPv6, and a next-generation resource registry. Columnists’ Corner: A pair of opinion pieces each dissect technology aspects of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Ephraim Schwartz offers up the inside scoop about what happened in the gulf states, and what needs to be done now in The fragile wireless network. David Margulius opened his column with something of a joke: “Want to see if IT matters? I’ll just go unplug all the servers and we’ll see how long the business runs.” What’s not funny, of course, is how Katrina resulted in total system disruption. Margulius writes about Gartner’s assessment that in preparing for disasters companies need to go beyond current predictive modeling practices and take into account human behavior. Technology Industry